The heart of the question before us is quite simple: Why after
25-30 years of Evangelical political involvement, at a high level of visibility
and influence, there is little or no improvement in the ethical quality of
American political discourse and practice? I’m not going to question the
assumption of the question, namely, that there hasn’t been any improvement. It
seems to me that that is obvious. The words "integrity" and
"maturity" were used in my assignment and those are good words, but
they don’t cut very deeply today without some explanation. Integrity becomes
an issue in public life, of course, as does maturity; but you need to spell out
what they mean. And in this context maturity means you have grown up ethically.
It means the ideals which are honored in discourse about the ethical or the
moral life have increasingly come into possession of you. Integrity would mean,
among other things, that you don’t have to run different processes in your
life—that you’re transparent and all parts of who you are hang together, are
consistent, so you don’t have to keep parts of yourself hidden. You don’t
live in the dark. But when you speak about growing up morally you are also
actually talking about the ability to lead on important matters of life.

I so appreciated David Wells’ discussion of debt. Debt is a
primary problem for life, as is repeatedly emphasized in all "Wisdom
Literature." "The borrower becomes the lender’s slave." (Prov.
22:7) Debt, if not handled with the utmost caution, undercuts the ability to
live and to lead. It becomes a great destructive force. The greatest threat to
the indispensable virtue of prudence in America is the credit card and
"easy" credit: the ability to gain possession of things without paying
for them. It is equally harmful at the level of government. John Maynard Keynes
is mainly the one who brought deficit financing into "respectable"
governmental practice. Some used to object to him that sooner or later you’d
have to pay the debt; and his brilliant reply was, "Sooner or later we’ll
all be dead." Of course, after that you don’t have to pay your
debts; someone else does. Debt is a relentless burden, rarely well handled,
though those who sell it to you present it as a wonderful opportunity. It
is a constant threat to well-being and character, to maturity and integrity.

I want to address this question of the recent failure of
Evangelical involvement in politics as directly as I can, by way of three
related factors:

The lack of connection between the Evangelical "gospel" now and
character development

. The fundamental message that is heard now
from Evangelicals is not what we have always heard from Evangelicals and other
Christians. Evangelical Christians have a long history, and pre World War II
Evangelicalism, especially in the 18th and the early 19th
centuries, was, quite simply, a different kind of religion— with very
different practices and theological assumptions.

The disappearance of moral knowledge from the "institutions of
knowledge" in our society

. The institutions of knowledge are
primarily the universities, including higher education generally, and the
church. You may find it strange to hear the church listed as an institution of
knowledge, but if you do, that is precisely a part of our problem, and we have
to deal with it.

The general withering of professional ethos

: Following upon the
previous points, the professional’s life is no longer tied to an exalted
vision of dignity and public good.

The Evangelical "Gospel" and the Lack of Character
Development

The current Evangelical understanding of salvation has no
essential connection with a life morally transformed beyond the
"ordinary." Evangelicals are good at what they call
"conversion." They’re not good at what comes later, because what
is preached by them as the gospel has no necessary connection to character
transformation. Post-World War II Evangelicalism is, basically,
fundamentalism in doctrine minus the pugnacious attitude. Unfortunately,
fundamentalism defined itself in terms of correct belief, but not in terms of
practice. Correct beliefs were a big and important issue and still are. I don’t
question that. But now we must understand that we’ve developed a doctrine and
an understanding of belief that does not entail action. It’s psychologically
false, and biblically false in terms of the language there used, but that’s
just the way Evangelicalism has developed. "Saving faith" has no
necessary implication for becoming Christlike. The idea of Jesus as
"Teacher," as "Master," and so on, became code language
among liberals in the pre-World War II era for "merely human." So if
you talked about Jesus as a Teacher, that meant you were dismissing Him as
Divine Lord, and "Teacher" disappeared from the fundamentalist (and
then the Evangelical) vernacular. And, of course, where you don’t have
teachers you can’t have students. So discipleship gradually disappeared during
the 20th Century. Discipleship has historically been the process of
association with Jesus and His people in which you become like Him. That
disappeared from Evangelical practice.

Now there are tons and tons of problems with this. This view is
founded on a whole hermeneutic that set aside the Gospels and said that our
gospel for today is Paul’s gospel, which was different from what Jesus
preached. The upshot is that now we have this lovely little bumper-sticker:
"Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven." The former is fine, the
latter is not. Christians aren’t perfect. The focus on perfection distracts
from the real issue, character transformation and obedience, and we’ve avoided
obedience long enough to no longer know how to obey. We have adopted this
position under a misreading of the gospel among Evangelicals, which says,
"Just forgiven." That’s it.

How do we grow in Christ-likeness? What does it look like? I
will give you a couple of verses here just as illustrations of where such growth
comes out. "Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count
others more significant than yourselves."1Now just think of the effects of
that, and of what it would be like to learn it to the point where doing it is
easy—where it was not a strain but was an expression of who you really are—easy
for you habitually to see others as better than yourself. Further on in that
same chapter: "Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may
be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish, in the midst of a
crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the
world."2That’s basic Christian life from Paul’s point of view. That’s
a life that wins the world and provides a model of life under God. That’s a
life that has to explain its source to an inquiring public, because it stands
out and is so different. That’s the New Testament vision. We’re talking
about taking I Corinthians 13 and saying yes that’s for me. I will do that. I
will let love dwell in me to the extent that, because love dwells in me, I
suffer long and am kind. Love also does not envy, does not puff itself up, does
not exalt itself, and so on. That would become my natural character. But in the
Evangelical gospel preached today there is no natural connection between what is
preached as the gospel among Evangelicals and the Christ-likeness described in
these verses.

There are three "gospels" heard today. The first is
that believing Jesus suffered for your sins brings forgiveness and heaven. That’s
the standard version of the gospel among Evangelicals. Is it true? Yes, it’s
true, but that’s not the gospel. It’s actually one theory of the atonement,
and it does not make up the whole of the gospel. Did Jesus die for our sins?
Yes, he certainly did. The second gospel is that Jesus was in favor of
liberation and deliverance from oppression, and you can stand with Him in that.
This is roughly the gospel of the theological left and it pretty much
turns out to be what the political left also thinks. Is that true? Yes,
that’s true. A well know preacher of other days, Vance Havner, used to say
that Jesus was not crucified for saying, "Behold the lilies; for they toil
not, neither do they spin," but for saying, "Behold the Pharisees, how
they steal." And from a human point of view, that’s what happened. He got
under the skin of the oppressors. He was in favor of liberation.

I call the third gospel preached today
"churchmanship." Basically, you take care of your church and your
church will take care of you. Today that’s widely practiced in
Christianity. Much more widely than people think, and, unfortunately, that
"gospel" isn’t even true. Now "churchmanship" is important
and that’s why my wife and I continue to be deeply involved in our local
congregation. A lot of people get disillusioned with the church and they don’t
know quite what to make of it. People sometimes ask me why, since I’m such
a "profound thinker," I’m still involved in church. I sometimes
reply, "Well, the Bible says you’re supposed to love your enemies and you’ll
find a few there." I mean to be humorous, of course, but I sense some
recognition out there as I say that. Actually, however, that’s what the church
is. It’s a place where you can get really mad at people and not run off and
leave them. It’s a place where anger and contempt can be unlearned. It’s a
place to learn the deep things of a fellowship in Christ that lovingly endures
disagreement, anger and injury. "Churchmanship" in that sense is
important. It’s vital. It’s in God’s plan and nothing is going to take the
place of it. The church is intended to be a school of love.

But what we’ve arrived at in North America is wall-to-wall
non-discipleship Christianity. The three gospels that I’ve mentioned do not
produce disciples who naturally move into progressive character transformation.
They don’t do that, and we all can know it through observation. The three
gospels define discipleship in different ways—if they deal with it at all—but
always in a way that will not include character transformation and routine
obedience. These gospels produce only consumers of religious goods and services,
not apprentices to Jesus in Kingdom living. We need to ask, if the gospels
preached today were the ones originally preached, would there be such a thing as
Christianity now? I don’t think so. It is now accepted that you can be a
Christian forever and not become a disciple. A disciple is someone who is with
Jesus learning to be like Him. That’s a disciple. Actually, that’s a
disciple in any area. A child in third grade learning long division is a
disciple of their teacher. They’re with them learning to be like them with
respect to a certain discipline. That’s what discipleship is. If I’m a
disciple of Jesus, I’m learning from Him how to lead my life in the Kingdom of
God as He would lead my life in the kingdom of God if He were I. How would He do
that? I’m learning from Him. I’m not learning to lead His life. He did very
well with that and that’s done and over with and we don’t need to do that
again. What is at issue now is my life. How am I going to lead my life?

This brings us back to the issue of the Evangelicals in
political life. If you’re involved in politics, how do you do what you do
there: as a judge, a state representative, or chairman of a committee in a
political campaign? How would Jesus do that? You must exalt him in your mind to
the point where you believe He would actually know how to do the job and do it
out the top. So in so many ways the great old text, "What think ye of
Christ?" is always the question before us, and if you think of Him rightly
you will naturally (supernaturally) become His student. You’ll become His
apprentice and you’ll believe that He’s the best man in your field, whatever
your field is. So this takes Him out of the category of merely a sacrificial
lamb and puts Him in the category of Master of the universe. People who are
running for the presidency are trying to get a job from Jesus. Did you know
that? Jesus is actually now the King of the kings of the earth. (Rev. 1:5) He’s
not waiting for the Millennium, though that will change the scene radically. But
this is now, and how would you be President of the United States and do it like
Jesus would do it under present conditions?

We have managed, curiously enough, for Evangelicals to become
"nominal" Christians. This is a real historical curiosity because one
of the things that have been distinctive of the Evangelicals through the ages—from
Luther on—is their resistance to nominal Christianity. But now it is possible
for Evangelical Christians to differ from non-Christians only or very largely in
terms of what they’re called. So, when we ask that question we started with,
"Why after twenty-five to thirty years of Evangelical…"etc., we have
this nominal Christianity as our answer. The lack of a noteworthy
difference in the moral character of public and political life is to be expected
from the very nature of contemporary Evangelicalism.

An outstanding Church recently discovered that involvement in
Church activities is no measure of spiritual growth! I love these people dearly;
they’re wonderful followers of Christ. But my heart bleeds for them and for
us, and I wonder how they could have missed this for so long. Thank God they
knew something was not working right and they went out of their way to make a
very elaborate study. But it is the gospel that is preached which establishes
the background for Evangelical practice, and you cannot "plow around
it." You simply can’t. That language comes out of frontier days when you
deadened trees to plant crops and just "plowed around them" until they
fell over. But you can’t plow around the central message we are preaching. It
determines the result we get. We have to come to grips with that. What are we
preaching? What is the message?

The result we get is the natural outcome of the basic message we
are preaching and that outcome is shocking to some people. What is the
alternative? Well, we can try preaching the gospel Jesus preached in the way He
preached it. We could try that. In my own life as a young, very green Southern
Baptist pastor it came as a shock to me when I realized that Jesus was not
preaching what I was preaching, and then I realized that I had been taught that
I was not supposed to preach what he was preaching. In fact, in one way or
another, that teaching has become standard. We today do not know how to preach
what he preached. The idea grows up that Paul had one gospel and Jesus had
another, which is patently false once you look at the texts. You’d never get
that idea from the New Testament unless you were told it must be there.

The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge

Around the middle of the last century (after WW II), knowledge
of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, ceased to be available from
our schools (especially higher education), and then from our churches. We often
get the order of events wrong when we start to talk about what has happened in
education with the elimination of Bible reading and prayer from public schools.
That elimination comes along way down the line. It only happened because of what
had happened in higher education decades before. After the Second World War, the
change in climate of thought began to hit street level and the court system. But
the real issue here was the disappearance of knowledge of good and evil,
right and wrong, from society. And I emphasize "knowledge" because we’re
talking about moral knowledge: about knowing what is good, what is right,
what is wrong and so on. This knowledge ceased to be available as knowledge
from our schools, but it had much earlier already dropped out of the position of
knowledge in elite intellectual circles and in higher education.

Toward the end of the 1800’s the university system began to
distance itself from the church, as is well known; and one essential way it had
of doing that was to interpret theology and morality in such a way that they
were no longer to count as knowledge. This process started with some
"theology" and with other "ecclesiastical" matters which
were taught at the various colleges but were, in fact, just traditions. Usually
the particular schools or universities had some denominational identification,
and they were each trying to teach their "faith and practice"
as a whole as if it all amounted to knowledge—though it was largely just
tradition. When the emphasis on research came along in higher education, the
traditional material often did not stand up to critical examination, and so,
rather than sorting it out progressively, to distinguish the sound from the
unsound, there simply arose a redefinition of what knowledge was.
Institutions of "knowledge" ceased to make the traditional moral
knowledge—of what kind of persons we ought to be and of what we ought to do—available.3The universities no longer explicitly undertook to teach people how to
live. (They certainly continued to do so implicitly.) Gradually there
disappeared any responsibility on the part of universities to teach what is
right, wrong, good, evil and so on. The background assumption or excuse was that
there is no knowledge of such things, so "Why not?"

Some may wonder, for example, how we’ve arrived (as recently
reported in the news) at the point of teaching "tantric sex" on a
certain campus, when something like that couldn’t have happened before. Some
may think, "Well it’s just because we used to be governed by prejudice
and now we’re open minded." But the things that occur on campus now
actually come into a vacuum left by the disappearance of moral knowledge. We
have moved from the age of "Why?" seeking a good reason for what we
do, to the age of "Why not?" No one in an official position is
prepared to go to the people who are doing morally questionable things and even
ask "Why?" I won’t begin to tell you stories about what happens in
the classroom itself, because in the classroom it’s perfectly all right to be radical
and to relentlessly teach a "radical" morality or religion. You can’t
be traditional, but you can be radical—that is even a "plus" to most
minds—and then in a pinch you can pass that off as political, not as moral.
The political, as we know, does not require knowledge. It only requires
advocacy, and that opens the door for things like tantric sex and almost
anything else admitting of "consent."

So in fact higher education and the elite professional groups
continue to pressure and teach on moral matters—good, bad, right, wrong—and
if you don’t believe it just get crossways of what is advocated in morality by
them and you will be subjected to full blown moral opprobrium. That’s
because in fact no one can separate life from morality. Moral sentiment and
moral opinions are always in full force, and perhaps more so now than ever,
because they are not subject to rational criticism in open discussion.
One of the things that used to happen in higher education and elite circles,
though certainly not in a perfect way, was that moral teachings were surfaced,
talked about, and subjected to rational criticism. Now they’re not. What is
taught is taught by example, tone of voice, selection of subject matters and so
on—oftimes by unguarded explicit statements—but there’s no rational
criticism directed at them because it’s not taken to be an area of
rationality or knowledge. Pressure, however, abounds.

Why does it matter whether or not there is moral knowledge?
This is really the heart of the matter: Knowledge alone confers the right and
responsibility to act, to direct action, to set policy, to supervise policy and
to teach. Sentiment does not do that. Opinion does not do that. Tradition does
not do that. Power does not do that. You expect people who act to know
what they are doing, don’t you? You probably would not take your car to a shop
that said on a sign in front of it, "We are lucky at making
repairs," or "We’re inspired," or "We feel real good about
it." This is not a matter of convention. It is how knowledge actually
works in human life, and it’s very important to understand that. Without
moral knowledge there is no moral authority. Hence there is only "Political
correctness," even though it looks and feels ever bit like morality and
often assumes a distinctively moral tone and force.

The upshot is that we fall into calling evil good and good evil.
One way of doing that is to say it’s all the same—as "diversity"
has a way of dictating. In the absence of public knowledge of good and evil,
right and wrong, and virtue and vice, human leaders have no moral basis upon
which to lead in terms of what is good, and so any attempt at leadership in
the political, legislative or other realm immediately becomes a matter of a
political or legal contest. There’s no acknowledged basis, no public
knowledge, of right and wrong, good and evil, in terms of which leadership could
be exercised. There’s no basis upon which to guide the leader’s personal
life and public choices, and as a result leaders tend to abdicate to public or
internal pressures with no basis to support them in goodness. Desire, pleasure,
and success guide them. Personal integrity rarely survives, still less does
effectiveness in leading for what is good and right.

Today, equality is not actually regarded as a matter of human
dignity and value. That is very hard to defend. Rather it is regarded as a
doorway to freedom. Freedom itself is not regarded in terms of the inherent
dignity and value of human beings, but rather as opportunity. Opportunity
is not regarded as opportunity to do what is good and right, but to get what
you want. We talk a lot about them, but the basic values in our society are
not equality and freedom—it is pleasure and "happiness." And these
are interpreted in sensualistic terms. Our society is a society of feeling.
That is why debt conquers common sense. Feeling is our master. That’s why we
have so many issues about abuse of one kind or another—abuse comes out of
frustration over feeling. That is why we are such an addictive society. Also,
watch your commercials for automobiles, etc., and see how much of it is
predicated upon feeling. Feeling runs our society. It also runs our massively
failing educational system. It is the only acknowledged ultimate value. That
explains why we do so badly in areas of learning that require sustained
discipline—which doesn’t "feel good."

Our society basically has two values, which come together. One
is doing what you want to do—mistaken for freedom—and the other is pleasure.
Sometimes people say happiness is one of our values, but happiness now means
nothing that would have been recognized as such by the great thinkers from
Aristotle to John Locke, for it translates into pleasure—having a good time.
(That is how "tantric sex" becomes interesting to Lutherans, and
Baptists, and…. Much of what Bill Clinton learned about sex—what is and is
not "sex with that woman"—he learned in legalistic religion.) The
disappearance of knowledge of moral values leaves us open to all sorts of
delusions. On freedom I want to recommend a writing by a man named Thomas Hill
Green, called Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. What
you find in Green is the efforts of a man who was raised an Evangelical and grew
more liberal as he went on in his life, but he retained a sense of what freedom should
mean. "Freedom is not just freedom from. Freedom is the exercise of
abilities to attain the good in community." This bears repeating.
"Freedom is the exercise of abilities to attain the good in
community." If you want to see real freedom made visible, watch a Pavarotti
in performance. That’s freedom. Watch a highly disciplined athlete, sans
drugs. You’ll see freedom. "Freedom is the exercise of abilities to
attain the good in community." If you follow the idea of freedom which is
in Thomas Hill Green’s writings, you will understand that this connection
between freedom and good is an area of knowledge. We must learn to
represent it as such.

Professional Calling Fails

In the past, human beings had access to the support of a
religious outlook like the one that characterized classical
Evangelicalism, in people like Richard Baxter and John Wesley or William
Wilberforce. When we think of Wilberforce, it’s important to remember that
there were two objectives on his part. One was the abolition of the slave trade.
For this he is admired today and got a movie made about him. But there was also
the "reformation of manners," as he called it. It is important to look
at his book4 that was written to address the issue of "manners" and ask
yourself how many Evangelicals of today would be comfortable with what it says.
It’s written out of a specific theological context. John Wesley and John
Newton shared and promoted its outlook, and it presents a very different
perspective on "real Christianity" from anything we would recognize as
"Evangelical" today—no matter how heartily we sing "Amazing
Grace."

With the absence of publically available knowledge of the good
and the right, and of any essential relationship with the Christian Gospel, the
traditional understanding of professional devotion to the good one’s profession
serves is lost. When knowledge of good and devotion to God ceases to be the
governing principle of professional life, then professional integrity collapses
or shrinks down to mere technical competence. Now, in the theory of the
professions as it’s being done today, you see the gradual but inevitable
disappearance of any idea of devotion to the public good. It’s very
interesting to see how "market theory" enters the picture. The only
obligation of the professional, it is increasingly said, is technical expertise,
and in the context in which individuals use and exercise that expertise—we
vainly imagine—the market will sort out who’s good and who’s bad, and
competition will make things all work for the best for the public. Yes, and
about thenanother cow flew by.

The "Rotary" slogan, by contrast, is: "Service
Above Self"—still displayed at the meetings. You don’t have to wonder
where that came from, right? That’s Jesus, and people knew that and honored
that when they started the Rotary Club. They knew that and thus they had a
moral vision of professional life, which remained very strong in this
country up until quite recently—again, finally caving in to the influence of
the academy. But what could the slogan mean today? With the demise of Christian
moral understanding as a bulwark of public life, it certainly means nothing with
power to oblige. Really, it means hardly anything at all. Still, "Service
above self" is the idea back of traditional professionalism, and if you
have a Christian vision of life in the kingdom of God as a disciple of Jesus—and
on the basis of that you have moral knowledge and a corresponding moral life—then
you’re prepared to become a very different kind of person in public service.
You won’t live for your self advancement above all, but to advance the causes
of what is good and right in your special field of activity—the political
above all.

Is There a Way Back?

You will not be surprised to hear me say that there is. There is
a way back, but it is the way of Jesus Christ understood now in the generous but
rigorous way that it has been understood for much of the past in this country,
and in other countries in other parts of the world. There is a way back, but
Evangelical leaders (pastors, teachers, writers) must lead. They are the ones
who have to lead the way back. They will find many others to join them if
they will but lead. One of the things that will happen for those who follow
Christ fully and grow in their relationship to Him is that they will stand out
in such a way that people will look to them for leadership. There’s a very
interesting incident in the history of the Huguenots. For many centuries there’s
been an ongoing battle between Islam and the rest of the world. It is not a new
thing. There was a period in which those under Islam ran sea galleys around the
Mediterranean—ships run by oars, and those oars pulled by slaves. It’s
interesting that on those galleys the Huguenots were the ones that everyone
trusted. If they had anything of value to be kept, they put it in the care of
the Huguenot. If there was any issue of truth or righteousness, the Huguenots on
board were the ones who were looked to for right judgment. That is an example of
what we were looking at in Philippians 2 above, of shining out as lights in a
darkened world.

Our point of attack and of service today must be the
presentation of the basic Biblical truths as knowledge of reality. What the
world has done is to negotiate the church into a position of saying that it does
not have knowledge. Christians just have faith, and faith is an irrational leap.
The world assumes Archie Bunker’s definition of faith: "It’s what you
wouldn’t believe for your life if it wasn’t in the Bible." This is a
total misunderstanding of faith. Although faith often goes beyond knowledge, it never
works—on the biblical model—outside of a context of knowledge. Many of the
things we as Christians have faith in are things we actually also know—or can
know. That will seem almost cognitively incoherent for most people today,
because they’ve had it ground into them that when it comes to faith, knowledge
is simply ruled out. That’s why it is hard to make any sense of
"separation of church and state" as it is discussed today,
in comparison to how it was understood in the writing of the Constitution, which
makes perfect sense. People today think of something other than knowledge when
you say "church." If the church brought vital knowledge to human
existence, there would be no more talk of separation of church and state, in
its current meaning, than there would be separation of chemistry and state.
In the past it was assumed that the church did bring vital knowledge to
human existence.

It was basically the decision of the church itself to let
knowledge go, in the 1800’s and 1900’s, and to undertake to present
something other than vital knowledge. That decision set the scene for
where we stand now. I’m talking about knowledge as you require it in your
dentist, your auto mechanic, your brain surgeon, your politician (I hope), and
so on. You have knowledge of a subject matter when you are representing it
(speaking of it, treating it) as it is, on an appropriate basis of
thought and experience—including a proper use of "authority." Most
of the things we know, scientific or otherwise, we know on the basis of
authority. Somebody told us. Nothing wrong with that. What is presented in the
Bible on fair interpretation, and verifiable in life, is knowledge of reality:
especially of the spiritual and moral life in Christ. So if you’re going to
turn things back to genuine character transformation, you have to resist the
temptation to shy away from presenting the basic things—let’s call it
"Mere Christianity," it’s a good phrase—as knowledge. You have to
shy away from treating these things as something else, such as feelings,
opinions, traditions, power plays. You have to know and accept and present Mere
Christianity as a body of knowledge.

What do I mean? To repeat: you have knowledge of a subject
matter where you are representing it as it is, on an appropriate basis of
thought and experience. So, let’s try the Apostles Creed: "I believe
in God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His
only Son," and so forth. Is that knowledge? What do you say? The challenge
is to stand up for Christian knowledge. Not with dogmatism or
close-mindedness, but with all humility of mind, with all openness, ready to
hear anything from anyone; but you must represent it as knowledge if you are
going to find the way back to an Evangelicalism that is routinely
transformational. The disastrous mistake was that the Church backed away from
knowledge in the last two centuries, and piously proclaimed "faith" as
something superior to and indifferent to knowledge. But the Bible is all about
knowledge. Just read the texts with that in mind. Do inductive bible study on
"knowledge." Even eternal life is knowledge, as Jesus said (John
17:3), and as we see in II Peter 1:2-5, where we are told that we’ve been
provided with "everything that pertains to life and godliness through the
true knowledge of Jesus Christ." It’s all founded upon knowledge, though
there is more to discipleship to Christ than just knowledge.

Vital knowledge is of course never what we now call "head
knowledge," and that’s the way the Bible treats it. It is interactive
relationship. When Jesus says, "This is eternal life that they would
know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent," he’s
talking about interactive relationship. That’s knowledge, biblical
knowledge. Now of course "head knowledge" can come out of that, but
life knowledge is always interactive relationship.

There is also the idea of "secular knowledge" that
must be confronted. Allowing the secular world to define knowledge meant
there would be no knowledge of God, and the Christian would be left with mere
scraps of "tradition" and "diversity." But what business
does a university have being secular? Think about it a moment: secular university?
Is reality secular? George Bernard Shaw used to say that "Catholic
University" is an oxymoron." What he had in mind, that clever but
shallow man, was that if you were Catholic you had to be close-minded. Well,
maybe he needed to broaden his acquaintance with Catholics. There certainly are
close-minded ones, as with people of every group including the secular. But if
"Catholic University" is an oxymoron, then why isn’t "secular
university"? I submit to you that it is just that, and if you ever want to
see close-mindedness and thoughtlessness, step into the atmosphere of a secular
university. Is reality secular? Has someone shown that it’s secular? No. There
isn’t even a division of the university that’s called "The Reality
Department." They don’t even have one. It’s a little presumptuous for a
university to pronounce itself "secular," isn’t it?

Having lost knowledge then, people today are no longer in a
position to deal seriously with moral issues. The basic content of moral
knowledge is actually love. Love is so central that you cannot ignore it and
everyone knows that it is somehow the mark of a good person. We want to
be tough intellectually so we don’t want to use that word very much in
"serious" academic contexts. Thus, twentieth century ethical theory
can be accurately characterized as an effort to have morality without a heart.
We’ve surely seen how that "works." Remember the saying by
John Dewey: "We want to be good, but not ‘goody’." Everyone’s
busy not being "goody" and good disappears as a factor governing
rational life.

The good person is one permeated with agape love. Right
action is the act of love. To love is to be devoted to the good of what is
loved. I love those around me as I am working for their good, and of course mine
too, under God; and Jesus and his followers deal with the details of this at
great lengths. No one has ever come close to spelling out what love means as He
did. We have a terrible time understanding love because we confuse it with
desire. We say things like, "I love chocolate cake." Now for sure you
do not love chocolate cake. You want to eat it. That’s different. I
suppose you could imagine someone who actually loved chocolate cake. They’d
just go around taking care of chocolate cakes, watching out for their interests.
We have an awfully hard time today making sense of love because we’re so
confused on these matters. But once we pay attention, we realize that desire is
not love, and often is opposed to love. In this country every fifteen
seconds, I think it is, some woman is badly beaten—maybe killed—by someone,
usually one who says he "loves" her.

The path to moral goodness comes through Jesus Christ. The path
toward becoming a thoroughly good person, dominated by love, is apprenticeship
to Jesus Christ in the Kingdom of God. A disciple of Jesus is one learning from
Him to live his/her life, as Jesus would lead their life if He were they. And
now we’re back to the issue of who has the responsibility for bringing this
out, and it is the pastors and the teachers—primarily of the Evangelical
churches. Most of the other churches have fallen completely under the sway of
the university system with its moral blindness. The good news in the gospel of
the New Testament is that we can now enter the rule and reign of God by relying
upon Jesus for everything. We do that by becoming like little children, as Jesus
said, by going "beyond the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees"
(beyond "performance" into the depths of the heart), and by being born
"from above." Those are words chosen from Jesus’ teachings about
entering the Kingdom of the Heavens or the Kingdom of God.

Salvation then becomes not something about the afterlife, but
about the life that comes into us now—enters us by the Spirit of God
from above. Above is right here. It is resurrection life. That is salvation.
Paul says in I Corinthians 15:17, "If Christ has not been raised, your
faith is futile and you are still in your sins." Redemption does not
stop at the cross, it moves on from there. In II Corinthians 5:14-15 we
read, "One has died for all, therefore all have died, and He died for all
that…"—and how would you finish that sentence? I’m disappointed in
you! You got it right: "…that they who live should no longer live for
themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf." You were
supposed to say, as good Evangelicals, "…so that people can be forgiven
and go to heaven." Do you see the difference? If you have a theory of the
atonement that does not take in life now, you don’t have it right about the
atonement Christ provides. Moral maturity and integrity come through growth in
the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (II Peter 3:18)
Grace itself is God interacting in our lives. It’s interactive
relationship, the very place of knowledge of God. You grow in the grace and the
knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ as your life is increasingly dominated by
interactive relationship to Christ in everything. That’s what it means to grow
in spiritual and moral maturity. The things that Jesus teaches in the Sermon on
the Mount simply illustrate the life of the person living and growing in the
kingdom of God. They show that where that life comes out as we study under him
is routine, easy obedience. We shift out of where people are now, standing in
ordinary "fallen" relationships, where they might, for example, wonder
why you would want to tell the truth if it might cost you something. Instead you
honestly come to think and say, "Why would I want to tell a lie? Why? Why
would I want to mislead someone since I’m standing in the kingdom of God?
Since God is with me and I’m growing in his kind of life." "Lie not
one to another seeing you have put off the old man with his deeds."
(Col. 3:9, emphasis added)

Spiritual disciplines—necessary components of life with Christ—are
simply activities that we undertake, activities in our power. They are something
we do that enables us to disrupt evil habits and patterns in our lives
and receive grace to enable us to grow increasingly toward easy, routine
obedience to Christ. They are not laws. They are not righteousness. They are
simply wisdom. They are age-old and life-tested, and we need to use them in our
relationship with Christ. The grace of God will then flow more richly into our
lives. Solitude, silence, fasting, worship, fellowship…all those are
disciplines that help us receive more of divine life in our human circumstances.

Now, my final hammer blow here is that Evangelical pastors and
teachers are in a position to bring to their people and to the public a
knowledge that will guide life into the goodness and blessedness of the Kingdom
of the Heavens. That was Christ’s intention in giving us his "Great
Commission." He said in Kingdom Proclamation: "I have been given say
over all things in heaven and earth. As you go make disciples, surround them in
Trinitarian reality…." That’s what you do with disciples. You don’t
just get them wet while you say, "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit" over them. Jesus said, "Where two or three have gathered
together in my name, there I am in their midst." (Matt. 18:20) We use that
passage when only two or three show up. But actually it’s true in the case
where two or three thousand are gathered in His name—if they truly
gather in His name and He’s the one running the show.

They’re then in a position to teach disciples to do everything
that Jesus said. That’s the natural progression. Then—as in past times—you
will see emerging a people stunningly different from those who are children of
darkness and who walk in the kingdom of darkness. The pastors are to be the
teachers of the nations. The Christian writers and teachers are to teach the
nations. That’s their call. They teach the nation their knowledge—their
knowledge of God, their knowledge of the human soul. They have to stand in the
dignity of that calling and insist upon it, not out of arrogance but out
of humility, and out of the firm realization that they must bring to human
beings something that is both absolutely essential and something that no one
else can bring.

The Christian schools (Christian "Higher Education")
have to stand with the Pastors in that posture. Perhaps the greatest
issue facing the church today is whether or not the Christian schools will say
loudly and clearly that they have essential knowledge which non-Christian
schools do not have. There is a great resistance to this among Christian
educators. The old line, sometimes called main-line, churches were betrayed by
their schools. A great issue facing us today is whether or not the Evangelical
church will be betrayed by its schools. The great issue is whether or not the
Evangelical schools will say, "We have knowledge. Knowledge that the world
and the so-called secular universities do not have. We have knowledge. We’re
not just "nicer," and rather odd.

The ancient writers such as Plato and Aristotle believed that
the administration of law and political life was the highest of merely human
callings. The highest, because in it the greatest good (and evil!) was at issue.
But we should know now that it is a calling which can only be carried out in a
wisdom and power that is beyond the human. The Evangelical message and life in
its classical forms—not Post WW II—show how that can be done. There
is no real alternative in human existence. It isn’t because Evangelicals are
superior in any other respect. And it isn’t that people we call
"Evangelicals" are the only brand of Christians who must and can do
this. Os Guinness has expressed all of this so well in a paper, "An
Evangelical Manifesto," that he’s been working on with some others:
"This is the call of Christ," he says. "It isn’t the call of
the Evangelicals, and the words in response have to be the ones of those long
ago, ‘To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.’" (John
6:68)

This process has been carefully studied by Julie Ruben in her The
Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the
Marginalization of Morality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Return to text.

Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in
this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity, many editions—but try to read an unabridged
edition. Read it with William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.Return to text.